Performance of Wireless Body Area Network over on-human-body propagation channels

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have been recently proposed due to increasing technical demands on wearable computing and healthcare systems. Advanced studies for any communication system begin with a channel model. This paper examines channel models for signal propagation around the surface of the body at 915 MHz and 2.45 GHz (ISM bands). The applications of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) for WBANs has not yet been considered. The common MIMO communication systems are to be considered over Rayleigh independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) fading channel. However, the spatial correlation could affect the channel of short range communication systems. Therefore, the bit error probability of the space time block coding scheme is evaluated over uncorrelated / correlated Rician channel according to the distance between transmit and receive antenna on the surface of the body.